Review - Montego Bay Trading Co. Naga Bhut Jolokia Sauces
Today we turn our attention towards a trio of sauces that contain the world's hottest chile pepper - the naga bhut jolokia. While I love my foods mind-numbingly scorching (and the jolokia pepper by itself certainly provides ample amounts of fire), I think it's even more important for a sauce to have great flavor as opposed to just pure heat. If you have both, then your product is a solid winner in my book. Montego Bay Trading Co., found on the interwebs at BurnMeGood.com, aim for chilehead perfection with the "magic duo" of flavor and fire with the three sauces I'm reviewing - Heavenly Sweet Heat Naga Sauce, Hell's Inferno Naga Bhut Jolokia Hot Sauce and Undertaker Naga Sauce.
Heavenly Sweet Heat Naga Sauce
Ingredients:
Naga bhut jolokia, Jamaican reds, vinegar, water, salt, sugar, corn starch, spices, citric acid.
Thoughts:
The aroma was somewhat pleasant, with a decent fusion of hot chiles and vinegar with a smidgen of pineapple thrown in for measure. The smell isn't overly pungent, yet peppery enough to let you know you're in for something hot up ahead.
Appearance and texture-wise, it's a reddish-brown and a thick sauce/salsa mixed with tiny pieces of peppers and fruit. Well, scratch that last part, as there are no real pineapple fruit chunks; another look at the ingredients list confirms that any pineapple flavoring this condiment might have is produced artificially through sugar, corn starch, spices or citric acid. The label front does state "Hawaiian Pineapple" but that is to be assumed just a flavoring title.
And that brings us to the flavor. Yes, pineapple is one of the dominant tastes in Heavenly Sweet Heat Naga Sauce, and it goes well with the strong taste of the naga bhut jolokia and Jamaican red peppers. But it lacked that distinctive "fresh" taste of real pineapples to push this over the top for it to become a really great sauce. On pure flavor, this would rate a 3 out of 5 for me.
Despite Heavenly Sweet Heat being made from jolokia chiles, it's far from being a wickedly-burning elixir. There's nothing wrong with that, because as I said earlier, it's the combination of taste and heat that's most important, not just the burn. While people with weak tongues should probably avoid this sauce, Heavenly Sweet Heat would get a heat level of 3 or 3.5 out of 5 in my estimation.
Hell's Inferno Naga Bhut Jolokia Hot Sauce
Ingredients:
Naga bhut jolokia peppers, chocolate habanero peppers, red habanero peppers, vinegar, water, salt, garlic, and spices.
Thoughts:
Hell's Inferno has a much stronger chile smell than Heavenly Sweet Heat. It's a thinner, brown-hued sauce with a more pureed texture containing dark specks and seed remnants. The flavor is more back-to-basics with a distinctive fruity (but not in a sweet way), habanero/jolokia taste with powerful vinegar undercurrents. There's not much more I can say but that there's an extreme emphasis on heat. It's easily the hottest of the three I'm reviewing. The heat is immediate and yet keeps building and building and lingers for more than 10 minutes. Definitely NOT for wimps. I'd give this a hotness rating of 4.5 out of 5, so be forewarned. I usually reserve the "5" rating on my heat scale for sauces higher than 500,000 Scoville Heat Units, which are almost always extract-based sauces (which this is not). This might be tapping at the door of 400,000 - 500,000 SHU, but that is nothing but a guess on my part. Overall the taste isn't so bad, but it doesn't blow me away, either. To me it's a middle-of-the-road 2.5 out of 5 on taste.
Undertaker Naga Sauce
Ingredients:
Naga Bhut Jolokia, Jamaican Red Peppers, vinegar, water, salt, sugar, corn starch, spices, citric acid.
Thoughts:
Aroma-wise, it's less pungent than Hell's Inferno, and has less vinegar and more of a great, fresh chile pepper odor of Jamaican reds and a hint of Bhut Jolokia. Undertaker is a thick (almost pasty), dark-red liquid containing oodles of whole pepper seeds. The taste is really, really good and similar to it's aroma plus has a tinge of smokiness. The heat level is slightly less than Hell's Inferno but still a very lofty and fiery 4 out of 5. A little bit of this will go a long way, but since I like this sauce so much I didn't care. This deserves a winning 4 out of 5 on flavor.
Montego Bay Trading Co. Naga Bhut Jolokia Sauces, left to right: Heavenly Sweet Heat,
Undertaker, and Hell's Inferno
On Food:
Of course, I had to see what this was like on food. I first used Hell's Inferno on a Subway Pizza. I doused a good deal of sauce on there to spruce up the taste. There was a nice burn, but I felt the flavor was a tad too vinegary and tart. Still, not bad, and I continued to add more and more sauce as I consumed each mini-slice of pizza.
The next night's supper consisted of beef empanadas my wife whipped up. I tested out each sauce to see how it would fare with my empanada. I thought the Hell's Inferno did an even worse job of complementing the taste than it did with the pizza. Sure, it added mega-heat, but the flavor grated on me after a while. The pineapple-tasting Heavenly Sweet Heat was nice, but a beef empanada probably wasn't the best companion for this sauce. I think it would have gone better with the pizza the evening before. I finally hit pay dirt with Undertaker. The natural chile taste paired well with the empanada crust, beef and beans. I can imagine this going well with a number of other Latin and Mexican dishes.
All three sauces, plus many others that Montego Bay Trading Co. produces and distributes, can be purchased at http://www.burnmegood.com/store/view/cart/index.cfm. Heavenly Sweet Heat and Undertaker currently cost $11.95 (plus shipping) for 5 ounce bottles, while Hell's Inferno runs for $16.95.
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